Looking for Sociology after 11 September

Steve
Fuller

Writing in 'rapid response' mode to events that are themselves rapidly unfolding, there are two
general ways to proceed. One would be to scour the sociological literature for insights into
understanding the 'suicide bombing' of New York's World Trade Center on 11 September
2001 and the unfolding 'war on terrorism'. However, a month after the initial attacks, it is
striking that social scientists have yet to make a clear mark on the public debate, even in
terms of providing analytic tools. Instead, commentators have typically imported sociologically
relevant explanatory frameworks as background assumptions to their policy
recommendations. Thus, I shall proceed from this 'sociologizing in situ.'

Among the first and boldest frameworks to emerge was Neo-Darwinian in inspiration. Its
vividness lay in its apparent simplicity; hence the title of Richard Dawkins' 15 September
comment in the Guardian: 'religion's misguided missiles'.[1] In a series of rationally justified increments, Dawkins constructed
an image of the 'terrorists' who brought down the World Trade Center. He started with an
electronically programmed 'smart missile', followed by B.F. Skinner's operant-reinforced
homing pigeons, and ended by explaining the bombers' actions in terms of a Koran-induced
brainwashing, which promised sexually frustrated young males a martyr's paradise in the
afterlife. Dawkins wished to call attention to 'the devaluing effect that religion has on human
life' by teaching the 'dangerous nonsense that death is not the end'.

Dawkins never made explicit what his Darwinism was meant to explain here, except by
negative example -- the perversions of the human spirit that are required to contravene the
value Darwinians place on our material existence. However, there are elementary sociological
problems with both the phenomenon to be explained and the proposed explanation. Dawkins
reduces the terrorists' motives to a belief that 'death is not the end', yet the belief itself is not
pathological. Virtually every institution based on a very long-term strategy, be it religious,
scientific, or economic, takes seriously the idea that 'death is not the end'. Organized
violence, of course, is a recurrent social problem but hardly exclusive to religion.

Presumably, Dawkins engages in his heroic reduction of motives because he wants to make
the case for a more scientific outlook. Unfortunately, according to Dawkins' own preferred
scientific framework, individual organisms (including humans) are mere vehicles for the
recycling of genetic material. Yes, Darwinists value life -- but not at the level of analysis on
which Dawkins wants to oppose religion. Especially when taken in Dawkins' own 'selfish
gene' terms, the Darwinian attitude toward life is perhaps closest to Hindu and Epicurean
cosmologies, in which particular individuals are simply temporary moments in an endless
process. Indeed, Darwinism could provide just the right scientific self-understanding for a
suicide bomber (though not necessarily a Muslim one, given Islam's proscription against
suicide [2]). Simply consider the common Neo-Darwinian
explanation for altruism in terms of individuals sacrificing themselves in order to benefit their
kin, that is, those who carry the same genes. If the bombings turn out to be opening salvo in a
racialized 'clash of civilizations', this strand of Neo-Darwinism will probably acquire an added
significance.

Dawkins' rhetorically striking, but sociologically self-imploding, Guardian comment
highlights a simple methodological point that can often get lost in public debate. People tend
to assume that their preferred frameworks can both explain particular situations and justify
their attitudes toward those situations. However, the frameworks and the attitudes may have
rather independent origins and hence not fit so well together. I have suggested, contra
Dawkins, that Neo-Darwinism can not only help explain but also rationalize the so-called
religiously inspired acts of 11 September. Of course, it remains an open question whether an
explanatory framework's ability to rationalize what it explains should count for or against it.
This question goes to the heart of sociology, which spent the Cold War debating the merits of
"functionalism" in related terms.

Moreover, the question is forefront in the minds of US-based commentators. Here a fault line
has emerged between supporters of Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens, both of whom
are normally identified with 'anti-establishment' thought[3].
Chomsky interpreted the events of 11 September as retaliation against the US for its long-
term support of various oppressive regimes in the Islamic world. Moreover, he seemed to
suggest that, given the current geopolitical situation, those concerned with redressing these
injustices had no choice but organized violence. The appropriate response, then, would be for
the US to remove its contribution to the oppressive regimes, not simply to escalate the level of
violence. Hitchens leapt on Chomsky's statement as an instance of 'rationalization' and 'liberal
guilt'. Hitchens focused on the enormity of the actual events, the loss of 6000 'innocent lives',
which he took as evidence for a radical difference in values between 'Islamic fundamentalism'
and 'the West'. He noted the repressive character of ordinary life in the 'Islamist' countries,
even when not officially at war. Thus, Hitchens denied the suggestion that the US could have
prevented the attacks, had it taken certain political measures, such as withdrawing military
support for Israel.

On one important point, Chomsky and Hitchens were in agreement -- that the US continues to
foster oppression in the Islamic world. However, Hitchens adopted a Cold War-style
understanding of the events surrounding 11 September, which itself involves heroic
rationalization. To be sure, matters are complicated because the Cold War is both a literal
cause of the current situation and a model for understanding it. The literal cause is that the
US and its allies propped up regimes and supported insurgents in the Islamic world to halt the
spread of Soviet influence, the ultimate aim of the Cold War. However, the legatees of these
regimes and insurgents have now been collectively gathered (at least by the US) as a foe,
called 'terrorism', which is the purported target of 'Operation Enduring Freedom'. In this
context, Hitchens resembles a broad band of early Cold War commentators who called for a
direct attack on the Soviet Union to 'finish the job' of something called 'totalitarianism', the
ideology that supposedly linked Hitler and Stalin. Over the years, this view came to be the
preserve of right-wing 'hawks', as liberals retreated to a policy of 'containment' in the face of
potential nuclear confrontation.

It is worth recalling that the Cold War slowly emerged as the US and its allies came to realize
that the deal that FDR and Churchill had struck with Stalin at Yalta for dividing control of post-
World War II Europe had not gone to plan[4]. The question
then was whether to attack the Soviet Union for contravening the spirit of their agreement or
simply contain Soviet activities to its legally sanctioned sphere of influence. The latter turned
out to be the mark of Cold War foreign policy. Commentators gritted their teeth and explained
the inevitability of 'dirty hands', in which the price of an overall good is the tolerance of
pockets of evil. However, the focus was on the price paid in allowing the Soviet Union to
flourish within its borders, not in the West's support of groups that kept the Soviets from
exceeding those borders. These are the 'chickens that have come home to roost', in Hitchens'
caricature of Chomsky's position. It will be interesting to see whether Hitchens continues his
hardline stance, if events like the bombing of the World Trade Center are repeated elsewhere.
He too may retreat to the dirty hands rationalization of the Cold War liberals.

Chomsky and Hitchens engage in heroic rationalizations of the current situation. A branch of
theology, theodicy, captures the genre of their discussion. 'Theodicy' literally means 'divine
justice', already suggesting echoes of 'Operation Infinite Justice', the original name the US
gave for the new war on terrorism. Historically, theodicy is tied with explanations of how an
omnipotent and omnibenevolent God could allow bad things to happen to good people, and
vice versa. (The Biblical reference point is The Book of Job.) For sociologists as ideologically
diverse as Peter Berger and Alvin Gouldner (who interestingly both wrote their major works in
Cold War America), the construction of theodicies is society's fundamental meaning-making
activity[5].

The theodicies put forward by Chomsky and Hitchens aim to rationalize the events of 11
September, indeed, by explaining the sense in which they were 'our own fault'. In both cases,
'the other' (variously defined as terrorists, Muslims, etc.) is portrayed as holding up a mirror to
our souls. However, the underlying principles of cosmic justice are diametrically opposed. For
Chomsky, the acts constitute justifiable revenge against our earlier atrocities. To prevent
future acts of revenge, a less aggressive foreign policy is required. For Hitchens, the acts
reflect our failure of nerve in stamping out evil, the only remedy for which is greater resolve.
An interesting feature of theodicies is that their persuasiveness is related to the absence of
generally recognized procedures for conflict resolution. That God moves in mysterious ways -
- say, by refusing to give Job a straight answer to his plight -- gives theodicy its intuitive
foothold. Not surprisingly, theodicies are more likely to flourish in debates over international
affairs than domestic politics. The former more closely resemble the proverbial 'state of
nature' in which the agencies of justice remain unspecified, largely because the very identities
of the first-order agents and their field of play are under dispute[6].

Nevertheless, considerable energy is being spent on naming and classifying the current
geopolitical situation, often with an eye to identifying the jurisdiction for resolving the conflict.
Here it is worth recalling that as the Cold War developed, the formal identification of the foe
lost its historical anchor, exchanging echoes of Nazism for resonances from potential Soviet
allies, especially the People's Republic of China. Thus, 'totalitarianism' was replaced by
'Communism' -- a subtle but significant shift from a label that 'the enemy' rejected to one they
embraced as a rallying point. The aftermath of 11 September provides the potential for an
analogous shift in labeling from 'terrorism' to 'Islam'. Perhaps mindful of this precedent,
Osama bin Laden and his allies have been eager to portray the emerging conflict largely as
Hitchens suggests, 'The West versus Islam'. Whereas both 'totalitarianism' and 'terrorism'
share the negative connotation of disregard for the liberal's respect of the rule of law and
personal freedom, 'Communism' and 'Islam' imply a depth of commitment that transcends the
liberal's shallow attachment to materialist values.

Two other consequences of the Cold War labelling analogy are worth remarking. The first is
the patent arbitrariness of the foes gathered under these labels, without the presence of a
common threat they are thought to pose. Only then we can understand why, say, Stalin and
Mao -- an industrial and an agrarian Communist -- came to be seen as joint targets and why
Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein -- a devout and a secular Muslim -- may now come
to be seen as joint targets. The second consequence is that the labels have a penumbra
effect. They cast a shadow over groups not originally meant to be covered. For example,
'socialist' came to be used interchangeably with 'Communist' in Cold War America, leading to
the demonization of attempts to extend the welfare state (say, to nationalized health
insurance) as 'creeping socialism'.[7]

So far I have said little about the contribution of more explicitly 'theoretical' discussions to an
understanding of the current scene. The most public clash of theoretical perspectives so far
has been between former RAND Corporation Sovietologist, Francis Fukuyama, and former
National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, Samuel Huntington [8]. Writing shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama famously
argued that the Soviet Union was the final sustained form of resistance to the inevitable
triumph of liberal democratic capitalism. While Fukuyama admitted the prospect of other
forms of resistance, these would be local and transient, as people come to realize the benefits
to be had by participating in a global liberal order. In this sense, we have reached the 'end of
history.' In contrast, Huntington delivered a worldview from the aftermath of the Gulf War,
seen not as an isolated event but a harbinger. He postulated a 'clash of civilizations', the most
significant of which would be between Islam and the West. Whereas Fukuyama took Hegel as
his narrative model, Huntington drew from Spengler and Toynbee, with the important
exception that Huntington's civilizations do not rise and fall as phases of a life cycle, but as
the emergent outcome of their interactions.

Until the events of 11 September, Fukuyama had enjoyed a decade of vindication, at least
vis-a-vis the likes of Huntington, who seemed keen to reinvent the Cold War along culturalist
lines. However, now the tables are turned. Huntington has stayed in the background as other
commentators quote him freely, whereas Fukuyama has been put on the defensive. He
dashed off opinion pieces to the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal,
reassuring readers that we remain at the end of history[9]. Writing as someone who would side with Fukuyama over
Huntington in a 'war of the worldviews', I must confess that these 'rapid responses' have
drawn some wrong-footed distinctions.

Whereas Huntington carefully dissects Islam's interactions with the West, observing a
growing 'Islamized modernity,' which helps to illuminate the modus operandi of Osama
bin Laden and his allies, Fukuyama identifies modernity with specifically Western values. He
thus unwittingly reproduces a 19th century liberal imperialist perspective on the matter that
ignores the techno-economic sophistication of the current attackers. Here a revisit to
'modernization theory' in development studies of the 1960s is in order. Back then it was
common to speak of the 'defensive modernization' of countries, most notably Japan, which
selectively adapted to Western imperialism by adopting the West's science and technology
without fully accepting its secularized Christianity and democratic liberalism[10]. Perhaps now we should speak of 'networks' rather than 'states'
as the subjects of defensive modernization, but the concept still stands.

Another concept from 1960s development theory that deserves re-examination here is
'backwash', which the veteran US specialist on Asian affairs, Chalmers Johnson, has updated
as 'blowback' [11]. The common idea is that peoples who
refuse or fail to modernize defensively may nevertheless be empowered to interfere with the
spread of imperialist ambitions. When writing on such matters, Fukuyama prefers the lazy
word 'backlash', which fails to capture the extent to which Western exploitation unwittingly
provides the material conditions for its own opposition. However, the 'material conditions' in
this case are not of the usual Marxist sort. They do not constitute a common experience of
immiseration that galvanizes the masses[12]. Rather they
are conditions made possible by the West's own liberal democratic values, which only elites
are in a position to exploit. For even as the West has contributed to the oppression of ordinary
Muslims, its recent policies have not (a) tried systematically to stamp out Islam as a
personal faith, (b) prevented worthy and/or funded Muslim students from studying Western
science and technology, and (c) prescribed that science and technology be used only for
some ends but not others.

The US 'folk response' to the above observations is outrage at the ingratitude of Osama bin
Laden and his Muslim sympathizers who have bitten the hand that feeds them, given the
ease with which they received the relevant technical training in the West. While this response
is easy to dismiss out of hand, it does point to some deep questions about the
institutionalization of both so-called liberal democratic values and knowledge of science and
technology. What exactly is the source of outrage here? Answers to this question quickly
bring us to the classic liberal conundrum of 'tolerating even the intolerant', which remains the
default Western educational policy with respect to value-laden issues. Perhaps the Gordian
knot can be cut by arguing that the 'intolerant' will be rendered tolerant once enough of them
enjoy the benefits of a tolerant education. But perhaps the issue runs deeper, relating to the
consequences of the relative absence of explicit value instruction in the West.

Also, there may be more to the idea of 'value-neutrality' of science and technology than we
wish to admit, especially if this phrase means 'open to indefinitely many value interpretations'.
Both friends and foes of something called the 'Western global hegemony' have generally
believed that people schooled in science and technology at Western educational institutions
for long periods may acquire (perhaps in spite of themselves) 'Western values' that serve to
undermine their 'authentic interests'. In response, as part of a counter-hegemonic strategy,
both social researchers and policymakers have tried to promote 'indigenous knowledges'.
Even accounting for the nuances associated with the development of this strategy, the events
of 11 September would seem to call into question the creeping tendency in social theorizing
to assimilate value differences to the possession of different bodies of knowledge. Indeed, the
current fixation on knowledge as the driving force of social change may have prevented
theorists from anticipating the nature of the 'war on terrorism' in which we are
embroiled[13].

The above considerations leave the social science community with much to do and think
about. In conclusion, I would just draw attention to two points. The first is that a 'very long
term' perspective can be useful in framing appropriate research questions and public
statements. The common religious roots of Islam and Judaeo-Christianity lead me to suspect
any general explanatory framework that counterposes 'Islam versus the West', especially if
this dichotomy is posed as a difference in values, as, say, Hitchens and Huntington insist.
Since the values espoused on both sides of the divide are in fact very similar, a social
scientific explanation of the conflict will quickly need to move to a different level. Secondly, I
would urge that we take seriously one general point that Osama bin Laden has raised in his
broadcasts, namely, that ordinary Western citizens remain largely ignorant of the plight of the
Islamic world and its causes. It is clear that this deep and widespread ignorance, combined
with too many pious words about the value of liberal democracy and the sanctity of human
life, helped trigger the events of 11 September. If we can do nothing else as teachers of
sociology, we can certainly attend to this problem.

5The locus classicus of discussions of theodicy in sociology
is Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1964), p. 138 ff. Modern
discussions proceed from Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday,
1967), and Alvin Gouldner, 'The Sociologist as Partisan', American Sociologist 3
(1968): 103-126. I have discussed the function of both social and natural science as modern
theodicies. See Steve Fuller, 'Divining the Future of Social Theory: From Theology to Rhetoric
via Social Epistemology'. European Journal of Social Theory 1 (1998): 107-126; 'The
Reenchantment of Science: A Fit End to the Science Wars?' In K. Ashman and P. Baringer
(eds.), After the Science Wars (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 183-208.

6For this reason, modern forms of theodicist reasoning
abound in versions of capitalism ('invisible hand') and Darwinism ('natural selection') that lack
a strong sense of system-level governance.

7In the case of Islam, a relevant precedent may be the
traditional American suspicion of Roman Catholics in public life. Catholics are the largest
religious denomination in the US, yet only the 35th president (John F. Kennedy) has been
Catholic. This anti-Catholicism peaked at the turn of the last century, when the sons of Irish
and Italian immigrants sought public office. It was rooted in the folk belief that one cannot
serve both the Pope and the people at the same time. Even though the US is the most
religious nation in the developed world, it has had a very peculiar sense of how, when and
where religion can enter public life. It will be interesting to see whether US Muslims -- a
rapidly growing community -- will suffer the fate of Catholics in the coming years.

8Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last
Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

12Nevertheless, the global galvanization of commonly
exploited people remains a prospect seriously entertained in what may turn out to be the
radical left's definitive response to Fukuyama and Huntington: Anthony Hardt and Antonio
Negri, Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Here Islamic
resistance to capitalist exploitation is discussed briefly but knowledgeably (p. 146 ff).
However, much of the argument for Osama bin Laden's Muslim followers making common
cause with, say, the readers of George Monbiot's articles in the Guardian rides on the
former 'realizing' that they are an 'imagined community' organized primarily as a resistance
movement. Readers may be left to ponder the likelihood of that happening.

13It is always invidious to blame sociologists for not
predicting the future, given that that is not their primary task. However, the amount of praise
that was initially heaped upon Manuel Castells for his three-volume, The Information Age:
Economy, Society and Culture invites a consideration of where he was right and wrong.
Castells fully realized that Islamic fundamentalists would pose a serious threat to the
'informatized world-order'. He also provided a more sophisticated, yet still Marx-inspired,
scenario of the nature of the threat than one finds, say, in Hardt & Negri's Empire.
Castells recognized that the modernization of Arab states enabled more of the population to
be educated, which in turn raised economic expectations. These were frustrated, as the
vicissitudes of the West's global strategy led to a destabilization of basic material conditions.
However, Castells envisaged neither that the 'terrorists' would be Western-trained nor that
they would inflict their 'terror' with technology that was at least 30 years old (i.e. passenger jet
aircraft). Like most of today's knowledge-driven social theorists, Castells was fixated on the
increasing availability of state-of-art information technology as potential instruments of terror,
say, via computer hacking into financial market transactions and air traffic control systems.
See Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell), esp. p. 18 ff.